"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it.
I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. . . .
What I began by reading, I must finish by acting."

—Henry David Thoreau

"All good books have one thing in common—
they are truer than if they had really happened."

—Ernest Hemingway

"Books—the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity."

—George Steiner

 

"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through,
but rather how many can get through to you."

—Mortimer J. Adler

"For books are more than books,
they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past.
The reason why men lived, and worked, and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives."

— Amy Lowell

"Where My Books Go"

"All the words that I gather, And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring, And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is, And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving, Storm darkened or starry bright."

—W. B. Yeats

"And there are also many other things which Jesus did,
the which, if they should be written every one,
I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written."
—St. John

"In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest."

—William Ellery Channing

"Every creature is full of God,
and is a book about God."

—Meister Eckehart

"The profit of books
is according to the sensibility of the reader;
the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine,
until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart."

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page."

—St. Augustine

"I've read all the books, but one only remains sacred:
this volume of wonders, open always before my eyes."

— Kathleen Raine

"In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time,
the articulate audible voice of the Past,
when the body and the material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream."

—Thomas Carlyle

"There is more treasure in books
than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island,
and best of all, you can enjoy these riches
every day of your life."

—Walt Disney

"Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read!
And if one reads profitably, he would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar head is content to swallow every day."

—Voltaire

"We need the books that effect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves,
like being banished into forests far from everyone. . . . A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

—Franz Kafka

"In that abyss, I beheld how love held bound into one volume all the leaves whose flight is scattered through the universe around. . . .
For everything the will has ever sought is gathered there, and there is every quest made perfect, which apart from it falls short."

—Dante

"Each friendship and love is the ultimate journey where the soul is born and grows.
The journey is the drama of the heart's voyage into the tide of possibilities which open before it.
Indeed, a book is a path of words which takes the heart in new directions."

—John O'Donohue

"When you re-read a classic,
you do not see more in the book than you did before,
you see more in you than there was before."

—Clifton Fadiman

"The love of learning,
the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books."

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Youth is a time when we find
the books we give up but do not get over."

—Lionel Trilling

"No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books."

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Books are the flowers or fruit stuck here or there on a tree
which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest life,
of our first experiences. But . . . to tell the reader anything
that his own imagination and insight have not already discovered
would need not a page or two of preface but a volume or two of autobiography."

—Virginia Woolf

 "There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret the things,
and more books upon books than upon all other subjects;
we do nothing but comment upon one another."

—Montaigne

"It will be the best-written books which are passed on to posterity. . . .
Writing well also means thinking well, feeling well,
and behaving well."

—Comte George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

 

"How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all."

—Thomas Merton

"If you can get the right book at the right time you taste joys—
not only bodily, physical, but spiritual also, which pass one
out above and beyond one's miserable self, as it were through
a huge air, following the light of another man's thought. And
you can never be quite the old self again."

—T. E. Lawrence

"You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
May you be in love every day for the next . . . 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."

—Ray Bradbury

"And there are also many other things which Jesus did,
the which, if they should be written every one,
I suppose that even the world itself
could not contain the books that should be written."

—St. John the Apostle

"There is something about the book which fits the eye, the hand, and the mind:
it has achieved a perfect form, which cannot be transcended."

—Jacques Barzun

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles
the vision and stengthens our most fatal tendency—
the belief that the here and now is all there is."

—Allan Bloom

"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine binding should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."

—Robertson Davies

"Life being very short, and the quiet hours few,
we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books."

—John Ruskin

"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book:
who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image;
but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself."

—John Milton

"We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire.
People die, but books never die.
No man and no force can abolish memory. . . . In this war, we know, books are weapons."

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Buying books would be a good thing
if one could also buy the time to read them in:
but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken
for the appropriation of their contents."

—Arthur Schopenhauer

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers."

—Charles W. Eliot

"A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness,
leading out into the expanding universe."

—Madeleine L'Engle

"A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins."

— Charles Lamb

"Books are the carriers of civilization.
Without books, history is silent,
literature dumb, science crippled,
thought and speculation at a standstill."

—Barbara Tuchman

"I had already found that it was not good to be alone,and so made companionship with what there was around me
sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self;
but my books were always my friends, let fail all else."

—Joshua Slocum

"The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts."

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience:
this is the ideal life."

—Mark Twain